Life was different before the internet.

If you wanted to get in touch with your friends, you'd dial them up with a phone like this:

You'd stick your finger on a number and roll the wheel around 7 times.

And if the person you called wasn't at home, you had no way to get in touch with them.

That was until the beeper came out.

They looked like this:

You could send a short text message to the beeper.  But they couldn't text you back.

Then came mobile phones.

If you were really cool you could get a mobile phone that looked like this

When the PosterBurner servers crashed in 2021, and our backups failed, it felt like we traveled back in time - to the days of the beeper.

We had 1000 orders in progress.

We had a big canvas order for the Emmy Awards.

And we had no idea where to ship the prints because our database was lost in a hard drive failure.

We started printing out order confirmation emails.  

We'd lay out stacks of them on the floor and try to match orders to prints.

It was like a big boy version of this game:

It didn't work very well.

PosterBurner had been completely down for 3 days and the clock was still ticking.  

The guys doing the hard drive recovery kept saying it was almost done.

I was going nuts.

Then finally the email came.  

They had recovered the data.  

I started getting everything back where it needed to be.  

The website came back online, and production started moving.

We got all the orders out, and the canvas order for the Emmy Awards got there in time.

Then we moved PosterBurner to the cloud so this would never happen again.

After all of the stress and drama of the crash, and all the work fixing everything, I needed a vacation.

So I set that up.

But the last thing I did before leaving for vacation caused even more chaos than the server crash.

I'll explain that in the next post.

(You can see the start of the PosterBurner story here.)